Supply chain, enterprise and site planning applications and environments are widely used by manufacturing entities for decision support and to help manage operations. Decision support environments for supply chain, enterprise, and site planning have evolved from single-domain, monolithic environments to multi-domain, monolithic environments. Conventional planning software applications are available in a wide range of products offered by various companies. These decision support tools allow entities to more efficiently manage complex manufacturing operations. However, supply chains are generally characterized by multiple, distributed and heterogenous planning environments. Thus, there are limits to the effectiveness of conventional environments when applied to the problem of supply chain planning due to monolithic application architectures. Further, these problems are exacerbated when there is no one "owner" of the entire supply chain.
It is desirable for the next evolutionary step for planning environments to establish a multi-domain, heterogenous architecture that supports products spanning multiple domains, as well as spanning multiple engines and products. The integration of the various planning environments into a seamless solution can enable inter-domain and inter-enterprise supply chain planning. Further, an important function provided by some planning applications is the optimization of the subject environment rather than simply tracking transactions. In particular, the RHYTHM.TM. family of products available from i2 TECHNOLOGIES.TM. provide optimization functionality. However, with respect to planning at the enterprise or supply chain level, many conventional applications, such as those available from SAP.TM., use enterprise resource planning (ERP) engines and do not provide optimization. It is thus also desirable to expand planning analysis and optimization to the inter-enterprise or inter-domain level to enable planning optimization across the supply chain.